President Obama promised transparency and open government. He failed miserably. So why do Washington watchdog groups look the other way?

President Obama has failed to deliver on few promises as miserably as his vow to create a more transparent and open government. Shortly after being sworn into office, he sent a memo to federal agencies promising, “We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration.”

At the time, I was a staffer on the Senate Finance Committee for Republican Charles Grassley and couldn’t help but laugh.

Before I worked on Capitol Hill, I was a reporter and broke a story about how Bush administration officials had silenced federal scientists who had tried to speak up about climate change after Hurricane Katrina. I based the article on documents and email messages I had uncovered through the Freedom of Information Act. Even though the Department of Commerce handed over the emails, I was disappointed to discover that portions of them had been illegally redacted to hide the involvement of specific political appointees.

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After seeing years of heavy-handed secrecy and incessant White House claims of national security to hide the ball from Congress, I supported President Obama’s efforts to clean things up and restore some balance. But like most reporters, I am suspicious of these types of promises, especially from politicians. Regardless of who occupies the White House, I understand that power wants power. Scrutiny just gets in the way.

President Obama is no different. Whether it’s responding to Congress, media questions, or FOIA requests, this administration is no better than its predecessor. The big difference: Obama is a Democrat. And because he is a Democrat, he’s gotten a pass from many of the civil liberty and good-government groups who spent years watching President Bush’s every move like a hawk.

No one knows this better than John Kiriakou, the CIA agent who reported to federal prison two weeks ago for blowing the whistle on the agency’s use of torture. During an interview at an Arlington, Va., coffee shop, Kiriakou said the time has come for Washington watchdog groups—organizations like Public Citizen, Project on Government Oversight, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, and others—to admit that President Obama hasn’t come close to making good on his promise to make government more transparent and accountable.

“Dan Ellsberg. He called me again last night,” said Kiriakou, referring to the man who in 1971 leaked the Pentagon Papers and opened the world’s eyes to the United States’ long involvement in Vietnam. “We talk about this all the time. He keeps asking me, ‘Where is the outrage? If this were a Republican administration, people would be in the streets, right? We would be marching in the streets. But people cut Obama a break to the point of irrationality.’ ”

Indeed. Soon after he was sworn into office, Obama appointed an “ethics czar” named Norm Eisen, a successful attorney, who had been one of the president’s classmates at Harvard Law School and later became a major fundraiser to his campaign. Eisen was likely handed the ethics portfolio for a specific reason: He was steeped in the world of Washington watchdogs. (Eisen is one of the co-founders of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW.) With Eisen on board, the administration was able to make cosmetic changes and neutralize harsh disapproval with a classic Washington maneuver—inviting potential critics to the White House for meetings. The administration understood that many of these groups would be satisfied by getting meetings with the ethics czar, and would calculate that if they became too critical of the president that their newfound “access” would be in peril. So the watchdogs have scampered up to the White House time and again, hopeful that maybe with the next election, the next initiative, maybe even the next meeting, something would change.

The most absurd example came a couple years ago when a group of Washington watchdogs went to the White House to give the president a “transparency” award, and the president refused to accept the award in public. The meeting wasn’t even listed on the president’s public schedule.

Even when members of his own party ask questions, the Obama White House throws down an iron curtain. After demanding answers about the government response to the BP oil spill, Democratic Arizona Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva sent a long letter to Obama expressing disappointment with the “unjustifiable” redactions he received, “including entire pages blacked out in the middle of pertinent e-mail conversations.”

One of the most glaring examples of Obama’s failure on transparency is his response to the “Fast and Furious” fiasco—the botched attempt by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives to find Mexican drug lords by tracking guns smuggled from the United States into Mexico. The debacle came to light when ATF whistleblowers met with investigators working for Sen. Grassley. Grassley sent a letter to the Department of Justice demanding answers; not realizing Grassley already had documents that laid out the operation, officials at Justice responded with false and misleading information that violated federal law. When Grassley pressed the issue, the Justice Department retracted its initial response but refused to say anything more, which has resulted in multiple hearings and subpoenas.

The storyline is classic Washington: Whistleblowers run to Congress about bad behavior; Congress demands answers; the White House throws up a wall. But where is the outrage, especially from the very groups who are supposed to be holding the government accountable? It doesn’t exist. Writing about Fast and Furious for the Huffington Post, Danielle Brian of the Project on Government Oversight mused whether the entire inquiry being led by Republicans was merely “partisanship” run amok. Wouldn’t it have been more logical for her to ask why Democrats hadn’t joined Republicans in demanding that the White House respond?

Such a poor grasp of the facts could be caused by the involvement of Rep. Darrell Issa, who was ordered years ago by the Republican leadership to turn the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform into a war machine against the White House. However, in this case, Issa was in the right.

As the administration continued to insist they had no involvement or knowledge of the ATF program, Issa released several Fast and Furious wiretap applications with signatures of top Justice Department officials. Rather than attacking the administration’s stonewalling, Melanie Sloan, the executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, attacked Rep. Issa for releasing the sealed documents.

Never mind that every investigative committee releases sealed documents. (I cannot tell you how many times my Senate Finance Committee colleagues and I released documents that were under seal.) It’s how Congress functions and does its job. However, CREW’s close ties to ethics czar Eisen might explain why Sloan was so quick to go on the partisan attack.

Tired of stonewalling, House Republicans threatened Attorney General Eric Holder with contempt, forcing Obama’s hand. In 2007, presidential candidate Obama told the Boston Globe, “My view is that executive privilege generally depends on the involvement of the president and the White House.” He must take a different view of it now, as Obama declared executive privilege to protect the Department of Justice as well, compelling the House to vote for contempt.

Most Americans don’t care about arcane legal battles over separation of powers between the White House and Congress. On election night, it was obvious that the issue had not resonated outside right-wing media circles. When it became clear that Obama was going to win, an employee with one of Washington’s watchdogs tweeted, “Now am I allowed to criticize Obama on drones & assassination & military commissions & secret memos expanding secret surveillance powers??” Maybe it’s a bad joke, but the implication is that she and her cohort had been withholding criticism of the president until it became clear that he had beaten Mitt Romney.

The ATF whistleblowers who brought the issue to Congress faced years of harassment from their agency but were ignored by Washington’s collection of good-government groups, who typically rally around whistleblowers. Only the Washington Times reported that Agent Peter Forcelli later resolved his disputes with the agency. After the election, Agent John Dodson was also cleared of any wrongdoings and was even praised by the ATF for taking the “courageous step of going to Congress to ensure that the public learned of the flawed tactics used in Operation Fast and Furious.”

Kiriakou says that it’s time for people to acknowledge the facts about the Obama administration’s attitude toward whistleblowers and transparency in general:

“I think these groups are stuck in a 2008 mentality where, ‘Oh my gosh, we have President Obama. He is a Nobel Peace Prize winner, and he’s promised greater transparency, and he really wants to do that but he just can’t yet. It will come. It will come. We should trust him.’ ”

The occasion is not yet ripe for many in Washington to admit that the Obama administration is no different from those who have come before it. But time will come when the cognitive dissonance between what Obama says and what he does will be too much.

“We should judge him by his actions,” Kiriakou says. Hopefully, it won’t take another four years.

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